


Shoe + Sand + Box

by panchostokes (badwolfrun)



Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Buried Alive, Cold Open Challenge, Gen, Hurt Jack Dalton (MacGyver TV 2016), Jack Dalton (MacGyver TV 2016) Whump, Macgyver Cold Open Challenge, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:41:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25087087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badwolfrun/pseuds/panchostokes
Summary: Jack had a dream he was buried once. A dream in which he died. This is that dream.
Comments: 14
Kudos: 22





	Shoe + Sand + Box

**Author's Note:**

> For the Macgyver Cold Open Challenge, based on Jack’s dream he references in the 1x06 cold open, sprinkled with a few references of some others, too. Can also be considered a bit of an improvised cold open, with the perfect opportunity for the opening credits cutting in right at the end!

_“_ _Step by step, heart to heart...Left, right, left, we all fall down...Like toy soldiers…”_

The humvee jostles back and forth against the ragged terrain. Tires climb over the small mountainous rocks along the roadless landscape. The steering wheel dares to take control, even in his gloved grip. The air conditioner’s a bust, even after the kid’s tinkering when they had stopped to refuel, rendering the air as hot and dry inside as it is outside, albeit with the added twinge of humidity due to the sweat dripping off of their noses. 

“I give up, what’s that one from?” the blonde yawns as Jack sings the chorus for the third time.

“The Lost Boys...I think…”

“Sounds right.”

“You’d think that, but more I think about it, that wasn’t on the tracklist.”

“So you can’t seem to remember what you dreamed about last night when you woke up screaming, but you can remember the soundtrack to a movie made in the eighties?”

“Hey, hey, hey, that soundtrack is a damn masterpiece. And it’s not that I don’t remember, necessarily...I remember dying. Just don’t remember what from. This time.”

“This time? Do you die in all of your dreams?”

A humorless chuckle crinkles his cheeks, the sweat streams redirect, which offers somewhat of a cooling comfort before he resets into dormancy to avoid the itching of his helmet’s chin strap.

“You don’t?” he looks over to the passenger, but the seat is vacant and before he can react, he checks on the road again, to make sure he was still driving straight…

Only to find he’s no longer driving at all. 

His foot’s on the pedal but the engine isn’t running. He tries to shift to another gear, but the stick doesn’t budge. There’s no key in the ignition. 

And it’s in this moment he realizes, he’s not even in a proper car at all. Everything is plastic, even the windshield in front of him that is coated with scratches and a thin layer of sand.

Through the window he’s able to see that he’s not on the ground as he can’t see the road ahead, nor the sky, but he can see a giant pair of dark eyes that are swirling with some sort of...glee. 

The car tips and he falls out, landing on a bouncy surface which he realizes in the palm of the hand of a giant young girl, sitting next to a boy and he finds that he’s no longer in the desert, though the air is just as warm, there’s more of a forgiving breeze, birds are chirping. It’s been a while since he’s been, but he guesses that he’s at some sort of...park?

“Whoa, that’s a neat one you got there Caleb! Where did you get it?”

“Mom bought it for me for my birthday. G.I Jack! There’s a couple different kinds you can get, this one is ‘Overwatch’ Jack Dalton!” 

“Where’s his watch?” the girl asks, flipping Jack over in her hands and examining him. He tries to move but finds himself frozen, though he can feel his heart beating rapidly, his lungs expanding and shrinking, his eyes darting around wildly searching for an escape...

“Not like that,” the boy laughs. “Means he’s a protector. He watches over this bomb guy, that’s what they were doing before you came here.”

“Bomb guy? He sets off bombs?” 

“No, he disarms them. He’s really smart, too, which got him the nickname of Wunderkind.”

“Wonderkid? What’s his real name?” 

“ _Wunderkind._ Angus MacGyver. But G.I. Jack always calls him Carl’s Junior, you know, cause of that burger place.”

“That’s silly,” the girl giggles. “It’s funny, though, G.I. Jack kind of looks like my Dad…before he left me...”

“You wanna play, Riley?”

“I’d love to!”

“Okay, I’ll be Jack, you can be Mac!” the boy instructs as he swipes Jack out of her hand, sets him down onto the ground of what Jack realizes is a sandbox, but it’s just as vast and endless as the one he had been enlisted to survey. The boy sticks his feet a few inches in so that he’ll remain standing, but Jack finds that he still has control of his limbs as he wobbles with his arms stretched out to maintain balance. He contemplates running, but first he has to figure out where to, where he can find Mac, if Mac’s even around--there’s other action figures in the arena, all dressed up in army gear, just like him, but he can’t see their faces. They’re all face down in the sand. 

“Okay, so G.I. Jack and the Wunderkind were driving along, when suddenly their car _flies into the air!”_

The boy picks up the car and hovers it over Jack, who tries to move out of the way as the car starts crashing down, but his feet get stuck on a twig and he falls face down into the sand, covers his head as the looming shadow completely covers him…

The car instead lands a few inches ahead of him, and with his free hands, the boy then launches Jack into the air, and in turn out of Jack’s own body until he falls back, face up in the sand, his body sticking out as if it had just “jumped” out of the car. 

“‘Oh no! How did this happen, Jack?’” the girl feigns, but unlike his puppeteer, Mac’s pretend voice is a disembodied one, all he can see on the other side of the car is the giant girl sitting on her knees with empty hands, eagerly watching the show beneath her. 

“‘It musta been a landmine, the sandbox is full of them!’”

“I don’t sound like that!” Jack protests, but his words are ignored, just as his movements are when he gets to his feet to search for his missing friend. He overturns the first soldier he can find, only to discover a horribly melted, indistinguishable plastic face instead. His dog tags are blank and plasticized. A nameless empty vessel to be forgotten just like all of his other fallen comrades.

Is that what he’s doomed to become?

He has no time to fully react, however, as he’s plucked from his scouting by the giant boy’s fingers to return to the playing field. 

“‘We gotta be more careful, hoss!’” the boy jiggles Jack’s body in his grip as he speaks for him. He drags Jack around the car, and Jack’s hopeful that maybe he’ll finally get to see his companion, maybe he had just been crouching out of his view--“‘Any step we take can lead to another--’”

The boy makes an explosion noise and Jack is tossed into the air, his limbs flailing wildly as he flies far above the sandbox. He gets a bird’s eye view of the pretend-desert landscape, peppered with bodies of fallen soldiers and overturned cars falling into the sand. 

He calls out in desperation for Mac, but there’s no response, just his own screaming as he plummets to the ground, his hands outstretched to brace for the fall but his senses don’t catch up to him until almost a minute after the impact.

It may as well have been a real explosion. The ground shakes, his ears ring, his body is engulfed in a flameless fire. He’s breathless. Motionless. He can’t see anything, sand pours into his mouth, spilling into his lungs. He tries to pull himself up, but his fingers can’t get a solid grip on the sand that seeps through his fingers. His legs are compressed, his chest is squeezed. 

To the two titans who poke his body, he must look like a worm writhing in the dirt. 

“‘Jack! Oh, Jack, he’s dead!’” the girl fake-cries. 

“Time to send him home…” the boy laments in a sad voice.

“I’m...not...dead…” Jack groans through thin lips, but his body is simply scooped up and tossed into a cardboard box. 

A shoe box, he realizes, from the curved dip at the top of the box that pours an ounce of sunlight into the space, which seems to be somehow just as small as he is. 

Maybe even smaller. 

Or maybe he grew a few more feet...or rather, inches to his relative “action figure” height. 

Or maybe the kids had manipulated the box so that it was a proper “coffin” for their game.

His feet touch one end of the box. 

The top of his head barely scrapes the other. 

His arms bump up against the walls.

The box seems to compress down enough so that there was only a few inches between him and the top of the box. 

He feels his body begin to fall again, but it’s a slower descent, more dreadful as the sunlight disappears, and a waterfall of sand fills its place.

He sputters and coughs, putting his hands in front of him to prevent the sand from covering him entirely, but no pore of his skin is safe, even under the thick layers of his uniform. 

“Hey! Let me out of here!” he cries out, batting his hands into the darkness only for every wave of motion to come to a halt against a wall. 

“But wait! G.I. Jack is still alive!” the boy’s muffled voice cries out in an excited proclamation. He clears his throat and his voice booms like the narrator of all the old cartoons Jack used to watch, “Can the Wunderkind save his best friend as the swirling sands suffocate our fallen hero? Stay tuned!”

His fists pound against the lid of the box. It’s stupid, he thinks, it’s just cardboard, he’s strong enough to punch through _wood_ let alone freaking _cardboard,_ but even his fingernails don’t seem to scratch the surface at all. Jack screams so loud and long that his vocal folds unravel and snap and he’s cut off abruptly, trading the anguished plea to the void for hyperventilating sobs in the face of this utter helplessness.

It’s a futile effort anyway, as the sand is getting heavier, more compact, higher--so high that his face is almost up against the ceiling when he takes one final breath of air while the two children laugh over their playtime together, completely unaware of the suffering their toy endures up until his final moments, when all of his senses seemingly halt and everything just…

Ends.

* * *

It’s not a slow, gentle waking as he arises from an impromptu nap. A fierce gasp, his limbs playing catch up as he almost re-enacts the events of the dream in a wild flail. He brushes off the sand that’s not actually present as he looks around to find that he’s the same size as the furniture around him--well, at first he’s tricked by the perspective, when he realizes that he’s on the floor. He’s back home and not in the endless sandbox infiltrated by giants. 

Well, not _his_ home. Mac’s home. 

He must have fallen asleep on the couch, which he realizes he fell off of and somehow rolled underneath the coffee table. He nearly hits his head as he wriggles out, hearing the same song from his dream playing through the laptop. 

A music video for “The Lost Boys.”

“Jack?”

Mac appears from the entrance hallway, tossing his keys onto the kitchen counter with bags of food and drink. 

“You okay, there?” he smiles as Jack looks up at him, panting.

“Mac...when I die... _cremate me.”_

“Okay,” Mac furrows his face. 

“I’m serious, man! Promise me you’re gonna cremate me.”

“Alright, scout’s honor, I promise,” Mac assures him, crossing his fingers on his heart and holding the others in the air. “What the hell could have happened to make you so dead set on cremation? You always insisted on being buried next to your Pops."

“Had...a really _wild_ dream, dawg,” Jack shakes his head. He hugs his legs to his chest, staying on the ground, even though it doesn’t help him to erase the shrinking sensation in his stomach. “Now I know why Anakin Skywalker hates sand so damn much, getting in places it don’t belong…”

Jack shivers and Mac stops unpacking the bags to walk over to Jack and sit on the floor in front of him.

“Alright, if you’re making references to the prequels then I know something’s really wrong. Dish, man, c’mon, what was the dream about?”

“Don’t...don’t remember,” Jack blurts. He blinks a couple of times, feeling a sting pricking the corners of his eyes. 

“You and I both know that’s not true,” Mac prods. 

“It was...really weird.”

“As dreams tend to be,” Mac reassures him with a hand on his knee. “Was it the quicksand dream again?”

“No. Kind of the same concept, I guess. Got...buried alive.”

“Oh, Jack…”

“A-and it wasn’t...just me there were others, too...soldiers...and Ri...Riley and Caleb were there…”

“Who’s Caleb?”

“Old Delta buddy of mine…” Jack turns his head, looks at the date in the corner of the laptop. “It’s his birthday today.” 

He makes a mental note of that, but will end up forgetting to text his best wishes to the man. 

For the second year in a row.

“You were there too, until...you weren’t. Riley kind of...acted like you, though.” Mac starts laughing. “What’s so funny?”

“I’ve had Riley act like _you_ for me a few times. Helps me think.” 

“You getting mushy on me, boy?” Jack teases with the beginnings of a smile. 

“Hey, there he is,” Mac slaps Jack’s arm encouragingly. “Don’t let it get to you, dude. Dreams are dreams, doesn’t mean that they’re gonna happen.”

“Or that I’m gonna get buried before I die?” Jack whispers. 

“Never. You’re immortal.”

“Only so long as you are. I’ve seen what happens when you ain’t around, it ain’t pretty.” 

“I’m gonna remember this conversation the next time you’re whining about us running for our lives saying we’re gonna die,” Mac waggles a finger as he gets to his feet to check his buzzing phone on the kitchen island.

“I don’t _whine,”_ Jack protests. “If anything, _you’re_ the whiner!” 

“Ugh. Can’t argue with that,” Mac heaves a sigh as he holds his phone in the air. “Gonna have to call a rain check on our vampire movie marathon, we just got called in.”

“Long as we don’t have to go into any sandboxes, I’m good.”

“Sandbox? You mean like...an _actual_ sandbox or from our army days?”

“Bit of both. Told you, man, it was a weird one…”

Jack’s voice trails off as he rises to his feet. On his way to the front door, he steps on something that had fallen to the floor off of a bookshelf that held various paraphernalia. He removes his foot and finds that it’s a packaged G.I. Joe action figure. He brushes off the footprint and gently places it back on the shelf. 

It winks at him. 


End file.
